Her major acting debut came when producer Anthony Hawtrey cast her in the role of Norma Bates in the Joan Temple play No Room at the Inn.

[1] Subsequently, the play transferred under producer Robert Atkins to the Winter Garden Theatre, Drury Lane.

She also played the same role in the 1948 film version, with the screenplay co-written by the famous Welsh author Dylan Thomas and Ivan Foxwell.

She was perhaps best known for her role as the tomboy Clarry in the 1947 Ealing Studios production Hue and Cry, a story set among the rubble and buildings of post-war London about a group of school children who discover that crooks have been sending coded messages about forthcoming jobs to their gang using the pages of a children's comic.

[3] On 31 March 1954, Dowling took her own life in the kitchenette of her home in Farmer Street, Kensington, by gas poisoning.